Margaret Jull (TRN) Costa

The Illustrious House of Ramires, presented here in a sparkling new translation by Margaret Jull Costa, is the favorite novel of many Eca de Queiros aficionados. This late masterpiece, wickedly funny and yet profoundly tender, centers on Goncalo Ramires, heir to a family so aristocratic that it predates even the kings of Portugal. Goncalo--charming but disastrously effete, idealistic but hopelessly weak--muddles through his pampered life, burdened by a grand ambition. He is determined to write a great historical novel based on the heroic deeds of his fierce medieval ancestors. But "the record of their valor," as The London Spectator remarked, "is ironically counterpointed by his own chicanery. A combination of Don Quixote and Walter Mitty, Ramires is continually humiliated but at the same time kindhearted. Ironic comedy is the keynote of the novel. Eca de Queiros has justly been compared with Flaubert and Stendhal."

Slippery figures in anomalous situations ghosts, spies, bodyguards, criminals haunt these stories by Javier Mar as: the characters come bearing their strange and special secrets, and never leave our minds. In one story, a man obsessed with his much younger lover endlessly videotapes her every move, and then confides his surprising plans for her; in another, a ghost can t stop resigning from his job. Masterfully, Mar as manages in a small space to perplex and delight. The short story fits Mar as like a glove, as Le point noted. His stories have been hailed as formidably intelligent (The London Review of Books), a bracing tonic (The Chicago Tribune), and startling (The New York Times Book Review).

Poison, Shadow, and Farewell, with its heightened tensions between meditations and noir narrative, with its wit and and ever deeper forays into the mysteries of consciousness, brings to a stunning finale Marias s three-part Your Face Tomorrow. Already this novel has been acclaimed exquisite (Publishers Weekly), gorgeous (Kirkus), and outstanding: another work of urgent originality (London Independent). Poison, Shadow, and Farewell takes our hero Jaime Deza hired by MI6 as a person of extraordinarily sophisticated powers of perception back to Madrid to both spy on and try to protect his own family, and into new depths of love and loss, with a fluency on the subject of death that could make a stone weep.

In addition to his own busy career as "one of Europe's most intriguing contemporary writers" (TLS), Javier Marias is also the translator into Spanish of works by Hardy, Stevenson, Conrad, Faulkner, Nabokov, and Laurence Sterne. His love for these authors is the touchstone of Written Lives. Collected here are twenty pieces recounting great writers' lives, "or, more precisely, snippets of writers' lives." Thomas Mann, Rilke, Arthur Conan Doyle, Turgenev, Djuna Barnes, Emily Bronte, Malcolm Lowry, and Kipling appear ("all fairly disastrous individuals"), and "almost nothing" in his stories is invented. Like Isak Dinesen (who "claimed to have poor sight, yet could spot a four-leaf clover in a field from a remarkable distance away"), Marias has a sharp eye. Nabokov is here, making "the highly improbable assertion that he is 'as American as April in Arizona, '" as is Oscar Wilde, who, in debt on his deathbed, ordered up champagne, "remarking cheerfully, 'I am dying beyond my means.'" Faulkner, we find, when fired from his post office job, explained that he was not prepared "to be beholden to any son-of-a-bitch who had two cents to buy a stamp." Affection glows in the pages of Written Lives, evidence, as Marias remarks, that "although I have enjoyed writing all my books, this was the one with which I had the most fun."

A second installment of a three-part tale that began with Fever and Spear finds MI6 recruit Jacques Deza discovering a dark side of his employer when Tupra, his spy-master boss, unrepentantly participates in a disturbing act of violence.

While waiting for a private midnight assignation on a quay by the Tagus, the narrator spend his day, enjoying a series of chance encounters with such colorful characters as a young junky, a gypsy, a lost taxi driver, the ghost of the long dead poet Fernando Pessoa, and many others, both real and imaginary as he makes his way around Lisbon. Reprint.